CineForm Intermediate Codec is now Open Source

When choosing a suitable video codec, you always have to consider file size, speed and quality. As a rule, only two of the three parameters can be optimized. Cineform&s Intermediate Codec was always about highest quality at high (de)compression speed. Compared to comparable codecs such as Apple&s ProRES or Avid&s DNxHD/HR, Cineform is not DCT-, but wavelet-based, which is why details never get lost in block artifacts, at most in blurriness.

On Github you will find the complete source code for the CineForm Encoder and Decoder SDK. (C and C++ with hand optimized SSE2 Intrinsics for x86/x64 platforms, incl. cross platform threading). It runs directly on OS-X, Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04. As a license you can use the Apache or MIT license.

Here are the supported pixel formats of the open source implementation of CineForm:

1. The github.com/gopro/cineform-sdk implementation (published on GutHub) is the original implementation with all optimizations (including remarkable multiprocessor scaling) that have been used in the closed source version of GoPro.

2. Also the RAW implementation is now open source. This allows compression rates between 4:1 and 10:1 and should be of particular interest to camera manufacturers. However, almost every manufacturer has meanwhile positioned itself with its own formats, which is why CineForm RAW now appears here a little late at the party.

3. CineForm uses a constant quality design for encoding, i. e. the bit rates vary depending on the scene requirements. While most other video codecs have a constant bitrate, the quality varies depending on the scene, which seems more desirable for us when it comes to encoding.

It remains to be seen to what extent the CineForm codec will find many implementations. It is a remarkable codec, which we would like to see spread more widely. more infos at bei gopro.com